Opinion From Ozempic to ‘Emily in Paris’, thinness is back — and feminism is paying the price

Melissa McCarthy, once the poster girl of “big” stardom, made an appearance at the Golden Globes a 100 pounds lighter. Emily, aka Lily Collins, continues to love her way through Paris and Rome without gaining so much as a love handle. Kusha Kapila and Amy Schumer, once the champions of the body positivity movement, have shrunk themselves into Size 6 bodies. Ariana Grande’s appearance in Wicked has been relentlessly discussed, not for her craft but for her rapidly shrinking body, which has elicited concerns about her health.

Yes, women are shrinking fast. The body-positivity movement of the last decade feels like an illusion. Some of this drastic shape shifting is the result of Ozempic, Mounjaro, and many other GLP generics. The wellness-beauty-pharma behemoth has always fed off women’s anxieties about their bodies. But this shrinking is not just pharmaceutical; it is sociological. Historically, when women’s movements begin to work, society steps in to starve women, to reduce their size as a precursor to policing their goals and grasps. This, a central argument in feminist theory, has all but disappeared from the discourse when we talk about women’s diets and desires.

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Think about it. Who benefits when women are too thin, too exhausted, too distracted with disciplining their bodies, too anxious about fitting into their clothes and their societies? The same institutions that have kept them busy on the weighing scale, too busy to weigh their options, too exhausted to voice their opinions.

Thinness is the patriarchy’s favourite weapon. You don’t need to revoke women’s rights if you can sap their energy. You don’t need to censor women’s thoughts if you can keep them occupied with their image. A woman thinking about weight gain is not thinking about capital gains. A woman at war with her thighs and abs is not fighting to break glass ceilings.

Also Read | Call antimicrobial resistance by its name

Catch a glimpse of guests at the Golden Globes, Filmfare awards, or at lavish weddings and choreographed sangeets. The women are uniformly thin (or at least trying to be). Hair blown, faces botoxed, bodies disciplined into compliance. Spanx, Pilates, diets, drugs, whatever the means, the end is a body of desirous proportion.

And then there are the men. Men with protruding stomachs, poor posture, and faces that suggest they have never once wondered if carbs are “worth it”. Men radiating the confidence of people who know the world will never judge them by the size of their bellies, but by the depth of their bank balances or the positions they hold. Because many of them are where the money and power lies.

What shows like Emily in Paris and body-positive influencers like Schumer and Kapila, co-opted into the body shrinking movement do, is normalise erasure. The system is smart; it doesn’t cancel women who critique it. It styles them, puts them on a strict diet and exercise regimen, and calls it growth. Thin equals capable. Thin equals desirable. Thin equals deserving of a beautiful life in a beautiful city like Paris or Rome. Emily in Paris is less about escape into fashion fantasy and more about escape from what women see as ugly reality.

With the shrinking of bodies, minds shrink too. Conservatism in politics, control in culture, flows from this. Trad wives rise. Girls who can afford to get married earlier do. Careers can wait; family first. The patriarchy is restoring its balance.

It is not that men are conspiring together to achieve this; it is just a system of checks and balances. A thin woman is a manageable woman. A woman chasing thinness is not chasing systemic change. This is the system designed by men at its most efficient.

What if women stopped shrinking? Not in the Instagram-affirmative way with words, slogans, and pink posing. What if women learnt to recognise their obsession with their bodies as distraction technology? Extreme thinness not as an aesthetic choice, but a cultural warning sign?

The truth is simple and inconvenient. Empowered women take up space. Patriarchy responds by asking us to give it back. Weight loss is not a moral failure, but context matters. Kapila’s transformation into a sleeker, slimmer, more brand-aligned version of herself isn’t a personal contradiction so much as a cultural inevitability. When even the loudest critics of thinness culture begin to conform to it, you know the pressure is systemic.  Feminist progress is being undone medically, one injection at a time. The conversation has shifted from thinness to “taking control of your health”. But in the quest for health for our bodies, our mental health realigns to comply with the demands of society.

So much about our beauty standards is about containing women. A shrinking woman is reassuring to men, a trophy more than an equal. The cycle repeats itself at intervals. And so while the impulse to get thin and stay thin may seem instinctive, let’s read the room, more specifically the boardrooms, and see who gets to be in them and why, with losing weight, women lose so much else.

Sometimes the patriarchy doesn’t use force to keep women from progressing. They just use the lack of food.

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Motlekar is the writer of the Amazon Prime series, Call Me Bae